My Cross to Bear by Gregg Allman

Author:Gregg Allman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2012-06-21T09:03:12+00:00

AFTER MY BROTHER DIED, I KNEW I WAS GOING TO DO EXACTLY what he would have done had it been the other way around, and that was to say, “Let’s go fucking play.” I told the other guys that, in those exact words—“Let’s go fucking play.” And sure enough, we dove in that much harder.

We went back down to Criteria Studios in Miami to work on Eat a Peach, which we had started a couple of weeks before Duane’s accident. I was so dinged out, and we were so fucked up. But we knew we had to get back in the studio, and we had to get back on the road, because keeping busy was the only way to avoid going crazy. I knew that, but that’s about all I knew. We had to keep going, because I didn’t want to think about my brother—or anything, for that matter.

I was looking pretty rough, man. I was weighing out at about 150 pounds, had a twenty-eight-inch waist, and I looked like a rail. I was eating but when something like that happens, food doesn’t stick with you. We were taking vitamins, we had doctors coming over and sticking us in the ass with B12 shots every day. Little by little by little, we crawled back up to the point where we were standing erect.

We knew we had to finish off Eat a Peach, and we did a little work on it. We had already made the decision before Duane died to include “Mountain Jam” on the album, so any notion that we just used it to fill out the record is wrong. If you notice, “Mountain Jam” fades out on At Fillmore East and fades back in on Eat a Peach, which was what we had planned before Duane died.

We played a few gigs to road-test some tunes, then came back to Miami to finish the album. I remember walking into Studio D at Criteria—the one with the 110-year-old Steinway piano. I saw Tom Dowd, and I knew my purpose, and I knew I belonged there.

We all saw that playing music brought us out of the doldrums, and we actually smiled a little bit. The music brought life back to us all, and it was simultaneously realized by every one of us. We found strength, vitality, newness, reason, and belonging as we worked on finishing Eat a Peach.

That’s when we cut “Melissa,” which we had fucked around with quite a bit before; it was always too syrupy, so we’d just forget it. But I finally decided to cut it while I was on the plane heading down to Miami, and the finest guitar work I ever heard from Dickey Betts was on that song. Dickey brought in “Les Brers in A Minor,” and while he had the lick, all us other guys filled in the rest of it for him.

I wrote most of “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” on that old Steinway in Criteria. I had had that lick for a

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